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Thursday, September 17, 2015

Classroom Websites Made Easy

It's amazing how fast educational technology is growing, I was in Grad School in 2012 and learned about Wikis, Blogs, Google Sites, Weebly and so much more but never really delved into the whole new world of Learning Management Systems, we learned about Moodle that was it. Honestly, 3 years ago the only people talking about an LMS were online education providers, but this has changed. Why? Moodle was difficult and although free it needed hosting, but now we have products like Canvas, Haiku, Schoology and others that allow teachers to have truly free accounts. This is how I got acquainted with Schoology and there is no going back. Schoology (and the other free to use LMS) is so much more than a school portal. It truly lets you create an entire course fully online for free or use as a companion to a traditional course. I've done both and it is amazing how much you can do for free. I liked it so much that we purchased an enterprise account and the teachers and students love it.

I no longer need Evernote or Google to have a paperless classroom, everything can be submitted, graded, and shared in Schoology. It connects with my favorite Pixton, Nearpod and lots of other tools to eliminate multiple sign ins for the students. I can embed anything, upload any type of file and even a whole zip folder. I can record videos and audios directly into my course without the need of other software, I can grade without having to download the files, it has made my life so much easier.

The best part is that it has the look and feel of Facebook so it was easy for everyone to learn how to use it! You really need to try it out: www.schoology.com.